Trivial Pursuits

What is up with Kate Gosselin on Dancing With the Stars? I've been rooting for her to get better because I really want her to have a success with all the bad luck she's had recently, but wow. I'm not even talking about her dancing, which just seems to be beyond hopeless, though last week I was so proud of how she seemed to be coming along. No, I'm not talking about her dancing --I'm talking about her outfits. Who is putting them together for her? Is it someone who doesn't like her? Last night she danced to "Don't You Forget About Me" from The Breakfast Club and she was dressed like a fairy princess. And no, it wasn't a pretty fairy princess costume. It was like a 5 year old's idea of how a fairy princess should dress. Maybe her kids are giving her costume tips. Except, they always look very cute, so I have to go back to my earlier theory that some makeup and clothing person on that show just does not like her.

Related Digression:
Plus, she didn't know about the dance scene from The Breakfast Club? She's really never seen it? Okay, so she's like 4 years younger than me, but only 4 years, and that movie was huge. I know about famous scenes from movies that came out when I was a baby, so what was she doing? I guess everyone can't be a Soda Pop Diva.

And (see below) that's why I don't post very often. Because I get all heated about a subject and write about it for an hour and a half instead of doing laundry and being out in the sun. Just sayin'.

Goldman Sachs Gets Their Comeuppance? And Rants about Real Estate and the Recession

So the SEC has charged Goldman Sachs with fraud for playing one hand against the other. SEC Accuses Goldman Sachs of Fraud - San Francisco Chronicle, April 16, 2010

Good for the SEC! GS is saying that they are going to fight it. I guess they are just arrogant enough to think that they can fight it and win - since all these banks have politicians in their pockets. I hope GS goes down, and hard. Any bank or financial institution that contributes or contributed to ordinary people having lost their money, job, and/or their homes, should go right down with them. It would be a symbol to me that there is justice in the world. I don't hear about the people responsible for the financial meltdown losing their jobs, homes and investments. These people made out like bandits, while we bailed them out.

And don't get it twisted -- this bailout stuff didn't start with Obama, it started with Bush. Some of the same people b!#@hing about the bailout now (and other things they liken to the bailout) look a lot like the ones who were spreading terror that the economy would collapse if we didn't bailout their friends (oops, sorry, I mean banks). On Bank Reform...Christian Science Monitor

Sen. John Boehner (R), Ohio, who I saw in Michael Moore's Capitalism movie, was standing behind the Goldman Sachs CEO when he (the CEO) was thanking congress for bailing them out. That seems like a sign of solidarity. (I was wrong -- it was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and the former Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson. -5/11/10) Now Boehner is quoted in the article above as saying:"[The bill] “gives Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street banks a perpetual, taxpayer- funded safety net by designating them ‘too big to fail.’”" (Christian Science Monitor. "Obama: On bank reform, Sen. McConnell is 'cynical and deceptive'" csmonitor.com, accessed 4/17/10

I'm an apartment dweller and have wanted a home for years and years. Living in California makes it next to impossible. We make too much money for help to get into a home, but not enough to buy one (houses in our area have never come down in price significantly enough to even think about it. When we moved here, in 2005, I had a couple of realtors say to me that they could maybe get us into a house with a little "creative financing" and I knew that meant that these realtors and their attendant mortgage brokers were just the people I needed to steer clear of. Let's not even talk about how they were saying this to me before they even saw how much money I made -- the assumption was made, right off the bat, that a young Black woman looking for a house must not have any money (and that I was just eager (or ripe) for someone to take advantage of me.) Granted, I didn't have enough, but before you look at my finances, that's not an assumption you make. This wasn't just white realtors, et al., it was realtors of color as well. But that's okay, 'cause I remember names, and someday I will be able to afford a home -- by doing it the right way and on my own terms, not just to make a quick buck for you. Seems to me like there's a special level of hell for crooked bankers and people who will mess with your money to make themselves more.

I'm not saying I'm smarter than people who got caught up in the mortgage mess -- I'm saying that I actually understand their predicament. What if I wanted it so badly that I convinced myself to believe them, regardless of my nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right here, what with their interest only mortgages and too-good-to-be-true promises. In spite of my favorite quote: "He who hesitates is lost" I hesitate a lot, and my caution probably has saved me more than once.

I heard on some news show the other night some pronouncement about the recession being over -- really? Why do you think that? Because Bank of America and Chase posted profits recently? Ask the people who just lost their jobs at NUMMI NUMMI Employees Say Farewell - ABC 7, San Francisco, CA if they think the recession is over. Ask someone who has never had other options other than working in a dangerous coal mine, ask a teenager trying to earn pocket change, or someone just out of high school trying to make money to go to college, or any of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been out of work longer than 6 months, or a year, or the people who went on disability after having worked hard all their lives, and due to lack of job, lack of insurance, are now facing homelessness. Ask all the people whose homes are still getting foreclosed on. Ask them if the recession is over. If you cared, if you asked, you would probably see that for much of the working poor (read that again: WORKING poor -- working in a job that doesn't pay enough to make ends meet, but working themselves to death anyway) the recession started a lot further back than September of 2008. To add trauma to tragedy, so, so many of the programs that could have helped people dealing with unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, foreclosure, insurance issues, job training, medical issues, education, etc., are being threatened with cuts and closure, at least on the state level, if not federal.

I'm not an economist. I don't pay enough attention to politics and what's going on with laws and bills and such. I just know that from what I hear, our lack of concern for each other, our greed, and our ability to screw each other over and pretend like we are doing it for the other person's benefit, breaks my heart. I guess that's why I'll never be rich.

Best April Fools Joke Ever

In what has to be the biggest and best April fools joke ever, internet users trying to use Google this morning were greeted with a sudden name change: Topeka. Google "changed" its name as a nod to the fact that Topeka, Kansas changed it's name for the month of March to..."Google."


We're Not in Google, Kansas Anymore